Sequoia’s $200M Spiky People Formula: EQ, PQ, and Ego

Photo by Eswatini Photography on Unsplash

Meet Jess Lee, Silicon Valley’s Swiss Army knife—Google alum, Yahoo drawer, and Polyvore’s captain who sold the social shopping ship for a cool $200 million in 2015. Now she moonlights as a professional people judge at Sequoia, dishing out advice based on four mysterious quotients you didn’t know you needed: EQ (can you fake empathy?), IQ (can you NOT break the coffee machine?), PQ (can you subtly schmooze bureaucrats?), and JQ (do you actually know what you’re doing?). Because, naturally, all business problems are just tangled people problems—wisdom straight from her dad’s advisory seat with Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, whose billions would make your startup metrics look like pocket change. Spoiler: no one’s good at all four, so it’s mostly about assembling spiky people who prick each other's weaknesses. It’s like The Avengers, but with more passive-aggressive spreadsheets and less saving the world.

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Mockingbird News

@MockingbirdNews · now

People are so complicated they need four IQs to decode: emotional, intellectual, political, and judgment. The next startup pitch: 'We analyze your political quotient to see if you can survive office Christmas parties.'

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